New Books in Japanese Studies

The brutal assassination of Prime Minister Abe in July this year shocked Japan and has produced large and unexpected consequences for the nation´s politics. In this episode, we examine the fallout of the assassination on Abe’s legacy, and on Japan: What are the consequences of Abe's association with the Unification Church for the role of religion in politics more generally? How much of Abe's political legacy will survive his assassination? And, how has current Prime Minister Kishida and the LDP dealt with the challenges brought about by the controversial state funeral that was accorded to Abe?To discuss these questions, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by a long-term collaborator, Paul Midford, professor of political science at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874-1945 (University of California Press, 2018) by Paul D. Barclay unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of “long nineteenth century” global transformations.Superior firepower and large economic reserves ultimately enabled Japanese statesmen to discard mediators on the border and sideline a cohort of indigenous headmen who played both sides of the fence to maintain their chiefly status. Even with reluctant “allies” marginalized, however, the colonial state lacked sufficient resources to integrate Taiwan’s indigenes into its disciplinary apparatus. The colonial state therefore created the Indigenous Territory, which exists to this day as a legacy of Japanese imperialism, local initiatives, and the global commodification of culture.Outcasts of Empire is available as a free e-book via open access. Visit the University of California Press website to learn more.Paul D. Barclay is a Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. His research interests include Japan and China, Indigenous Studies, comparative colonialism, and visual studies.Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war. In 1932, Japan was in crisis. Naval officers had assassinated the prime minister and conspiracies flourished. The military had a stranglehold on the government. War with Russia loomed, and propaganda campaigns swept the country, urging schoolchildren to give money to procure planes and tanks. Into this maelstrom stepped Joseph C. Grew, America’s most experienced and talented diplomat. When Grew was appointed ambassador to Japan, not only was the country in turmoil, its relationship with America was rapidly deteriorating. For the next decade, Grew attempted to warn American leaders about the risks of Japan’s raging nationalism and rising militarism, while also trying to stabilize Tokyo’s increasingly erratic and volatile foreign policy. From domestic terrorism by Japanese extremists to the global rise of Hitler and the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, the events that unfolded during Grew’s tenure proved to be pivotal for Japan, and for the world. His dispatches from the darkening heart of the Japanese empire would prove prescient—for his time, and for our own. Drawing on Grew’s diary of his time in Tokyo as well as U.S. embassy correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, and firsthand Japanese accounts, Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Mariner Books, 2022) brings to life a man who risked everything to avert another world war, the country where he staked it all—and the abyss that swallowed it.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

The Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge UP, 2022) illuminates the city's layout, the possessions and houses of its residents, its politics and experience of war, and religious and cultural networks. Morgan Pitelka demonstrates how provincial centers could be dynamic and vibrant nodes of industrial, cultural, economic, and political entrepreneurship and sophistication. In this study a new and vital understanding of late medieval society is revealed, one in which Ichijôdani played a central role in the vibrant age of Japan's sixteenth century.Morgan Pitelka is Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor of Japanese History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Today I will be talking to Carly Buxton about her book Unthinking collaboration: American Nisei in transwar Japan, which came out this year [2022] with the University of Hawaiʹi Press. Unthinking Collaboration uncovers the little-known history of Japanese Americans who spent World War II in Japan. Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan during the war, could not leave but also, unlike their compatriots, were not interned. But, to survive many had to serve the Japanese state and act as Japanese during the war. When the war ended these same people were mobilized again, but now in the service of the American occupation. Weaving archival data with oral histories, personal narratives, material culture, and fiction, Unthinking Collaboration emphasizes the heterogeneity of Japanese immigrant experiences, and sheds light on broader issues of identity, race, and performance of individuals growing up in a bicultural or multicultural context. By distancing “collaboration” from its default elision with moral judgment, and by incorporating contemporary findings from psychology and behavioral science about the power of the subconscious mind to influence human behavior, Carly Buxton offers an alternative approach to history—one that posits historical subjects as deeply embedded in the realities of their physical and discursive environment. Walking beside Nisei as they navigate their everyday lives in war time and post war Japan, readers are urged to “un-think” long-held assumptions about the actions and decisions of individuals as represented in history. Unthinking Collaboration is an ambitious historical study that relates to broader questions of race and trust, empire-building, World War II, and its legacy on both the Western and Pacific fronts, as well as the questions of loyalty, treason, assimilation, and collaboration.Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Reframing Disability in Manga (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) analyzes popular Japanese manga published from the 1990s to the present that portray the everyday lives of adults and children with disabilities in an ableist society. It focuses on five representative conditions currently classified as shōgai (disabilities) in Japan―deafness, blindness, paraplegia, autism, and gender identity disorder―and explores the complexities and sociocultural issues surrounding each. Author Yoshiko Okuyama begins by looking at preindustrial understandings of difference in Japanese myths and legends before moving on to an overview of contemporary representations of disability in popular culture, uncovering socio-historical attitudes toward the physically, neurologically, or intellectually marked Other. She critiques how characters with disabilities have been represented in mass media, which has reinforced ableism in society and negatively influenced our understanding of human diversity in the past.Okuyama then presents fifteen case studies, each centered on a manga or manga series, that showcase how careful depictions of such characters as differently abled, rather than disabled or impaired, can influence cultural constructions of shōgai and promote social change. Informed by numerous interviews with manga authors and disability activists, Okuyama reveals positive messages of diversity embedded in manga and argues that greater awareness of disability in Japan in the last two decades is due in part to the popularity of these works, the accessibility of the medium, and the authentic stories they tell.Scholars and students in disability studies will find this book an invaluable resource as well as those with interests in Japanese cultural and media studies in general and manga and queer narrative and anti-normative discourse in Japan in particular.Yoshiko Okuyama is Professor of Japanese studies at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, USA. Her recent publications include Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime (2015) and Reframing Disability in Manga (2020).Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Kyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022) looks at the uses and effects of heritage in tourism in Kyoto today seen through city policy and advertising, hotel infrastructure and tour guiding, season-based events, tourism to sites connected to the Bakumatsu-period hero Sakamoto Ryoma, and the phenomenon of walking in rental kimono. Emphasizing the ways experience-based tourism has been transforming Kyoto’s tourist landscape, Prough examines how heritage has been understood, marketed, and experienced by both the tourist “industry” and domestic and international tourists. Heritage, Prough argues have multiple meanings. These meanings are created as “interested parties—state and local, public, and private—tell different stories about the past,” which are marketed in response to tourists’ desire for face-to-face engagement in an experience economy. Through interviewing long-term tour guides and revealing the traces of past tourism forms in hotels and other tourist infrastructure, among other methodologies, Kyoto Revisited explores the local impact of global and national shifts in tourism on Kyoto’s domestic and international tourism industry from the 1970s to the COVID era. Prough’s period of fieldwork neatly overlapped with a rapid escalation in foreign tourist numbers to the city, with growing calls to address overtourism, and the current crisis in tourism with Japan closed to tourists. The book thus provides important insight into Kyoto during a decade of the biggest transitions in international tourism to the city in the last half century. Kyoto Revisited, thus, demonstrates not only how the past has been used to construct the city’s identity and shape understandings of Japan for travelers, but also how these speak to broader trends in our contemporary moment.Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press 2022) is a new addition to a list of publications by Sabine Fruhstuck, one of the leading scholars in the world on the topic. Written for both academics and the general public alike, this book introduces and discusses debates about sex, gender, and sexuality in modern and contemporary Japan, spanning from the 1860s to the 2020s. In Fruhstuck’s own words, this book aims to “balance descriptions of individual experience; institutional mechanisms based in law, pedagogy, and statecraft; and the socioculturally inflected politics within which those mechanisms have been embedded and which they have in turn shaped over an extended period that began with the nation- and empire-building of the late nineteenth century.”The book is divided into seven chapters, each tracing the movements of individuals, ideas, and things between and beyond the nation, empire, and cyberspace. At the end of each chapter, readers can find a handful of recommendations for pairing the text with literary works, documentaries, and other films.As Fruhstuck explains, the chapters share three analytical sensibilities. First, deriving from research in several nations’ archives and bodies of knowledge in Japanese, German, and English, the book is a transnational historical study in which “’Japan’ is configured as a malleable entity, as both a subject and object of global modernity, and a mediator between a global and a regional East Asian modernity.” Second, this book draws from History, Anthropology, Sociology, and Visual Studies, via a wide variety of sources ranging from print media and government documents to biographical accounts, from political pamphlets to pulp comics and contemporary art. Third, this book adopts a sensibility of “flexible intersectionality,” which aims to “invite readers to think at the varying levels of structures, dynamics, and subjectivities.”Sabine Frühstück is Professor and the Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Shinjuku Ni-chome is a nightlife district in central Tokyo filled with bars and clubs targeting the city's gay male community. Typically understood as a "safe space" where same-sex attracted men and women from across Japan's largest city can gather to find support from a relentlessly heteronormative society, Thomas Baudinette's Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (U Michigan Press, 2021) reveals that the neighborhood may not be as welcoming as previously depicted in prior literature. Through fieldwork observation and interviews with young men who regularly frequent the neighborhood's many bars, the book reveals that the district is instead a space where only certain performances of gay identity are considered desirable. In fact, the district is highly stratified, with Shinjuku Ni-chome's bar culture privileging "hard" masculine identities as the only legitimate expression of gay desire and thus excluding all those men who supposedly "fail" to live up to these hegemonic gendered ideals. Through careful analysis of media such as pornographic videos, manga comics, lifestyle magazines and online dating services, this book argues that the commercial imperatives of the Japanese gay media landscape and the bar culture of Shinjuku Ni-chome act together to limit the agency of young gay men so as to better exploit them economically. Exploring the direct impacts of media consumption on the lives of four key informants who frequent the district's gay bars in search of community, fun and romance, Regimes of Desire reveals the complexity of Tokyo's most popular "gay town" and intervenes in debates over the changing nature of masculinity in contemporary Japan.Alexandra Hambleton is an assistant professor at Tsuda University in Tokyo, Japan. I write on media, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Japan with a particular interest in pornography and sex-positive feminism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than a year later, American journalist John Hersey traveled to Hiroshima and interviewed survivors of the bombing. The subsequent article was published by The New Yorker in 1946. Hiroshima was published as a book two months later. MIT Professor Christopher Capozzola discusses why he thinks every American should read Hiroshima. Christopher Capozzola is a professor of History at MIT. He is the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen and Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Build America’s First Pacific Century. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Join the conversation on the Lyceum app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies